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The power of petitioning in early modern Britain
Get PDFThe ‘humble petition’ was ubiquitous in early modern society and featured prominently in crucial moments such as the outbreak of the civil wars and in everyday local negotiations about taxation, welfare and litigation. People at all levels of society – from noblemen to paupers – used petitions to make their voices heard and these are valuable sources for mapping the structures of authority and agency that framed early modern society.
The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain offers a holistic study of this crucial topic in early modern British history. The contributors survey a vast range of sources, showing the myriad ways people petitioned the authorities from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. They cross the jurisdictional, sub-disciplinary and chronological boundaries that have otherwise constrained the current scholarly literature on petitioning and popular political engagement. Teasing out broad conclusions from innumerable smaller interventions in public life, they not only address the aims, attitudes and strategies of those involved, but also assesses the significance of the processes they used. This volume makes it possible to rethink the power of petitioning and to re-evaluate broad trends regarding political culture, institutional change and state formation
The Essay in the Career of the Contemporary English Novelist
Get PDFThis chapter shows how the essay plays out as a strategy in the career of the contemporary British novelist. Despite ‘the various ways in which the essay bristles against academic writing’, I argue here that the form has become deeply entwined with models of academic hierarchy and the teaching and research positions that contemporary novelists often take within universities. As this chapter demonstrates, such hierarchies also play out in the journalistic space of literary networking in which authors review each other and signal their affiliations to a wider public. In this context, the essay can also become a site of polemic controversy that can generate more heat than light. I finally also show how the essay plays a core role in bolstering the novel against other encroaching media, even when such defences may be preaching to the converted. While one might imagine, in the age of the internet, that the essay form would have declining cultural significance, I argue in this chapter, across the axes of ‘academia’, ‘controversy’, and ‘sophistication’, that the essay and its networks continue to exert a strong influence on the career of the contemporary British novelist
How much gaming is too much? An analysis based on psychological distress
Get PDFBackground: While there are calls to restrict the time spent on gaming because it is seen as problematic and potentially leading to gaming disorder (GD), there is conflicting evidence about this issue. We explored the association between the average weekly time spent gaming and reported GD symptoms. Additionally, Latent Profile Analysis was employed to investigate how time spent gaming relates to variables representing psychological distress (PD), such as satisfaction with life, symptoms of depression, and perceived stress. Methods: Data were collected using surveys with a large sample of highly engaged gamers (N = 14,740; Mage = 24.14 years, SDage = 7.0, 89.3% males). Results: We observed a positive, close to linear association between time spent gaming and GD symptoms. Groups at risk of GD played for about 42 h (SD = 19) on average, according to the American Psychiatric Association and World Health Organization frameworks. Furthermore, we identified four profiles representing varying levels of PD. Gamers reporting very high levels of PD (4.2% of the sample) played for 33 h per week on average. Remarkably, a substantial percentage of the sample (41.9%) showed no PD despite playing for 26 h per week. Conclusion: The association between gaming time and PD is complex as even prolonged time spent gaming can be unproblematic for many gamers
Riches and poverty in English Protestant culture, c.1550–1800: vernacularising the Parable of Dives and Lazarus
Get PDFThe story of the rich glutton Dives and the poor beggar Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31) was a popular subject in sermons, pamphlets, poems and ballads in early modern England. This article is the first substantial analysis of how the short but powerful biblical narrative was adapted and explained over the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It shows that—despite the huge religious, social and economic changes of this period—the message remained remarkably consistent. The beggar Lazarus himself was always depicted as a straightforwardly positive figure, offering an unusually clear association of poverty with virtue. However, many authors also used him to present a model of acceptable behaviour that imposed severe limits on the agency of the poor, and some turned him into a foil to criticise sharply those who failed to conform to such a model. Meanwhile, most portrayals of the rich man Dives presented his sinful misuse of his wealth as a lesson about not only the dangers of luxury but also the virtue of charity. A few authors offered more extreme interpretations that fitted with their specific circumstances, including radical condemnations of the rich and powerful during the political unrest of the mid-seventeenth century. Even more noticeable, however, is the striking resilience of a very ‘traditional’ core message, which previous scholarship on early modern religious attitudes towards wealth and poverty has tended to neglect
Optimized PAR-2 RING dimerization mediates cooperative and selective membrane binding for robust cell polarity
Get PDFCell polarity networks are defined by quantitative features of their
constituent feedback circuits, which must be tuned to enable
robust and stable polarization, while also ensuring that networks
remain responsive to dynamically changing cellular states and/or
spatial cues during development. Using the PAR polarity network
as a model, we demonstrate that these features are enabled by the
dimerization of the polarity protein PAR-2 via its N-terminal RING
domain. Combining theory and experiment, we show that dimer
affinity is optimized to achieve dynamic, selective, and cooperative
binding of PAR-2 to the plasma membrane during polarization.
Reducing dimerization compromises positive feedback and
robustness of polarization, while enhanced dimerization renders
the network less responsive due to kinetic trapping of PAR-2 on
internal membranes and reduced sensitivity of PAR-2 to the
anterior polarity kinase, aPKC/PKC-3. Thus, our data reveal a key
role for a dynamically oligomeric RING domain in optimizing
interaction affinities to support a robust and responsive cell
polarity network and highlight how optimization of oligomerization
kinetics can serve as a strategy for dynamic and cooperative
intracellular targeting
‘I feel like I’ve been swept along on a tsunami’: Bereaved people’s experiences of coroners’ investigations and inquest
Get PDFThe Voicing Loss project explored the role of bereaved people in coroners’ investigations and inquests, and the scope for policy and practice reforms to support their inclusion in the coronial process. The project involved interviews with 89 people who had experience of the coroner service following the death of someone they were close to, as well as interviews with coronial professionals and witnesses
The protection of rights and advancement of GenderS: in conversation with Abigail Nappier Cherup, Kevin D. Thomas, Wendy Hein, and Jack Coffin
Get PDFIn this panel discussion, we explore various ways that academics can advance work related to genderS, intersectionality and inequities so that it has impact within academia and in society. Panelists offer practical insights, relate challenges in doing this work, and suggest avenues for alternative yet impactful dissemination of work. The purpose is to demonstrate how those interested in supporting or working in this space might move from being allies to advocates and accomplices
Internal pattern matching in small space and applications
Get PDFIn this work, we consider pattern matching variants in small space, that is, in the read-only setting, where we want to bound the space usage on top of storing the strings. Our main contribution is a space-time trade-off for the Internal Pattern Matching (IPM) problem, where the goal is to construct a data structure over a string S of length n that allows one to answer the following type of queries: Compute the occurrences of a fragment P of S inside another fragment T of S, provided that |T| < 2|P|. For any τ ∈ [1 . . n/log² n], we present a nearly-optimal Õ(n/τ)-size data structure that can be built in Õ(n) time using Õ(n/τ) extra space, and answers IPM queries in O(τ+log n log³ log n) time. IPM queries have been identified as a crucial primitive operation for the analysis of algorithms on strings. In particular, the complexities of several recent algorithms for approximate pattern matching are expressed with regards to the number of calls to a small set of primitive operations that include IPM queries; our data structure allows us to port these results to the small-space setting. We further showcase the applicability of our IPM data structure by using it to obtain space-time trade-offs for the longest common substring and circular pattern matching problems in the asymmetric streaming setting
LeverAge: a European network to leverage the multi-age workforce
Get PDFBringing together 150+ scholars and practitioners from 50+ countries, and funded by the European Commission, COST Action LeverAge (https:// www.cost.eu/actions/CA22120/) is the first network-building project of its kind in the work and organizational psychology and human resource management (WOP/HRM) aspects of work and aging. Focused on the aging workforce, the Action aims to foster interdisciplinary and multinational scientific excellence and the translation of science to practical and societal impact across 4 years. Based on a research synthesis, we identify five broad research directions for work and aging science including work and organizational practices for a multi-age workforce, successful aging at work, the integration of age-diverse workers and knowledge transfer, aging and technology at work, and career development in later life and retirement. We provide key research questions to guide scientific inquiry along these five research directions alongside best practice recommendations to expand scholarly impact in WOP/HRM
When monopsony power wanes - part two: subjective agency
Get PDFIn this Part 2, Subjective Agency, I delve into the evolving power and agency of workers as structural conditions undergo transformation. Part 1 described how the law of competition propels firms towards centralisation, gradually diminishing the monopsony power wielded by global buyers in labour-intensive sectors. While manufacturers gain more power and significance, capable of undermining workers’ power, they also become susceptible to disruption. This section introduces the concept of Degree of Spatial Inflexibility (dsi). It posits that as a manufacturer’s monopoly power increases, the monopsony power in the supply chain decreases. However, this elevated monopoly power simultaneously establishes a higher dsi, amplifying the potential for worker disruption. It is essential to recognise that structural power shifts do not guarantee automatic benefits for workers; instead, they necessitate workers to capitalise on these vulnerabilities. This establishes a dialectical relationship between the evolving conditions of capital outlined in Part 1 and the subjective agency of workers, as detailed in Part 2 below
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